Friday, March 14, 2008

Hulu TV now open

I was lucky to have tried this out a few months ago as a beta tester and just thought it needed a quick blog post to update... Hulu TV is now "open to the public" !Overall, I'm pretty impressed with this website and since the beta option is over it looks like they were able to bring in more content providers too - which is great. The pickings were a little slim during the beta.I look forward to watching ALL of the episodes of Arrested development. It's a show I never really got into, because I missed a bunch of the first few shows. I didn't know the storyline, and could never seem to jump into it. But now I can watch it online from episode one.It's one step closer to the move of TV to the internet! Someday...Anyway, check it out... it's FREE! (You will need a decent connection to the internet though - I doubt dial-up will handle this sort of thing.)On nights now where there is nothing on, and I don't want to commit to a 2 hour movie, hulu will be a next option.Oh, and I should mention too... they also have movies on this site too!

Speaking of movies...I'm too tired tonight to go into a long movie review, but I did see two pretty good movies lately... Not great, but good.Eastern Promises (imdb)- A few minor things bothered me about this movie, but it was a pretty good drama. I gotta warn you though... it's got some pretty violent scenes and full frontal nudity of Aragorn's wee-wee (Viggo Mortensen imdb). Viggo was up for an academy award for this one and I agree he did a good job.I also saw:The Last King of Scotland (imdb)- I enjoyed this movie also, but again just a few things bothered me about it to really make it a great film. First off, I'm a big fan of Forest Whitaker. I think this guy is a fantastic actor. Hmm, if I remember right, he too might have been up for an academy award on this on too. The one thing that bothere me the most about this film though was the editing. No sooner would we see a fairly intense scene, then it would cut to a happy song, or some other scene that didn't flow nicely. I gotta say too... When watching the opening credits, I saw a name that really surprised me! Gillian Anderson! (imdb) I know, only a true geek would remember that name... She's the female lead from the TV show "The X-Files"! Wow, where has she been since that show? Well, it seems she is getting back into acting in films now (which by the way, I've heard rumors that there will be an X-files 2 movie opening soon). The funny thing is... I was watching the movie and thinking "I wonder when Gillian will make an appearance?" When all of a sudden... I realized I had been watching her for the past 15 minutes! I totally did not recognize her! First of all, she lost some weight and was looking pretty slim and trim. In the TV show she always seemed to have a layer of baby fat. Not fat by any means, but she just looked a bit pudgy. Well, not now. She looked good. Not to mention she now has blond hair too (well for this role anyway). She didn't have a big part in the movie, but it was good to see her again. Like bumping into an old friend.I'd recommend both films if you have the time.

ok, one more thing... I'm going to try Hulu's new "embed" feature here too. Yep, you can embed entire shows into a blog or website. (I tried to embed just a short clip, but it won't let me do that). Pretty cool feature I gotta say.

edit: oops, hulu comes in a bit wide for this blog format. I'm going to try and tweak the code to get it to fit. Also, it seems a little jumpy too, but that might be because it's playing through my blog and not directly through hulu.edit: Cool, looks like I can tweak the size to get it to fit. I dropped it from 510 wide to 350.